


Life is a cabaret

by orphan_account



Category: Anastasia (1997)
Genre: Dmitriissobroadway, Gen, cabaret, whopaysinrubles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-08
Updated: 2012-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-29 04:33:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/315868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This fic is a long-form joke: Dmitri takes the reward. And hauls ass as far as Berlin, where he is finally able to indulge his passion for musical theater at a place called the Kit Kat Club. You heard. Crossover with Cabaret.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life is a cabaret

**Author's Note:**

  * For [arianrhod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arianrhod/gifts), [tvconnoisseur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tvconnoisseur/gifts).



**Life is a Cabaret**

 

 

The Dowager Empress opens the heavy case.

 

Dmitri stares inside, flabbergasted into solemnity.

 

“Your reward. One thousand rubles,” she says, with disdainful ceremony. As if she is actually giving him anything of value.

 

“Rubles,” he says, weakly. They are in Paris, an apartment in the deuxieme, with boxes from Chanel discarded at the door. They are swimming in francs, and she pays him in rubles. What a bitch she is.  Where can he spend them?

 

Her carefully-drawn brows arch up. “You want your reward, do you not? And you are Russian, are you not? Take it and leave, leave and do not take it, but trouble me no further, if you have enough shame left in you to obey.”

 

She leaves the room.

 

Dmitri flips the case closed and takes it. Rubles. The Motherland shits on him once again, he thinks, lugging his worthless cash from the table. At least the clothes are worth something.

 

But he decides to keep them when his eyes alight on a gleaming object the Empress has left on her writing table.

 

The music box.

 

It is vermeil, he’s positive after so many years with it in his pockets. He had been saving it for her for so long, in a saccharine gesture he’s sure is unlike him.

 

He pokes at it with a fingertip. Vermeil, but the jewels beveled around the lip are real enough and in any case, the émigrés in this city and their friends will hemorrhage fortunes for this specific kind of royal crap.

 

He puts it in his coat pocket, where it rests with tangible familiarity.

 

How appallingly stupid of the Empress to leave it out, when she distrusted him so obviously. He pulls his cap down on his brow and tromps out to pawn the music box.

 

\---

 

 

The first thing he buys is a train ticket, and he gets as far as Berlin --  maybe the only place in the world that might be glad to see a suitcase full of rubles.

 

Turns out, it isn’t.

 

“No, no, comrade,” says the man on the train. “Sorry to say. But hey—you are in Berlin.”

 

“Yes,” says Dmitri, “I know.”

 

“So anything is possible.”

 

The man hands him a card with an address written on it.

 

And anyway Dmitri has wanted to go to Berlin.

 

Anastasia left him behind, caught up in the dream of being the Grand Duchess of a country that no longer existed—that was something like an elaborate club in Paris, where everyone pretended the old titles had meaning. And Vlad was obviously planned to spend the rest of his days giggling with Sophie. All of them clinging to the past in an admittedly pleasant delirium. 

 

But Berlin is different. Even if the Weimar statesmen are myopically focused on fucking up, Berlin is different. Berlin faces forward.

 

Josephine Baker had touched his face on the street one night, and now he is in Berlin.

 

Where anything is possible.

 

“The Kit Kat Club” is the address, and after one night Dmitri has shaken off the Romanovs, his remaining francs, and surprisingly every last one of the rubles.

 

The lady who owns the apartments upstairs leases him one on credit, or sympathy, but beyond that he owns nothing.

 

Soon, he will learn to play the trombone. He’ll dance a hopak alone or a mazurka with one of the girls. The Master of Ceremonies will tease him every night before a crowd, saying “This is Dmitri Arkadyevich, who used to fuck the Grand Duchess Anastasia.”

 

Soon, his old life with become superfluous next to jazz and stage-lights and girls who roll over in bed in the morning to smoke cigarettes with one hand and put on lipstick with another. Superfluous in the face of riots in the street that stop at the doors of the cabaret, where everyone is friends, and generally everyone is drunk, and the lights are just a bit too dim. Where the music sounds great, and doesn’t stop until the sun rises.

 

 

 

But first, he sits in the back office with the Master of Ceremonies looking at him; his gaze is bored and acquisitive. The latter is promising.

 

“Where are you staying?”

 

Dmitri had thought that was clear. “Above the club,” he says. “My landlady has been very generous.”

 

“But nothing is for free,” says the Master of Ceremonies, then thinks about it. “Not in Germany anyway. Have you any skills?”

 

“I was a servant in the Royal Palace in imperial Russia.”

 

“Yes but have you any skills?”

 

“I can sing, I guess,” he says.

 

“I’ll take your word,” says the emcee. “Now you know the Kit Kat Club is like the Moulin Rouge these days. Everyone is from all over. Can you speak English, or French? Here, I do not care if you can do so well. Tell me, in three different languages, that I am welcome.”

 

“Wilkommen,” says Dmitri, “Bienvenue,” he thinks about the last one: “Welcome.”

 

 

 

 


End file.
